Susan Brownell Anthony Accomplishments

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American activist who was a leading figure in the women’s suffragist movement, and the women’s rights movement. She was an abolitionist, author, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and much more. Her accomplishments throughout her life helped give a passageway to the creation and passing of the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Where did is start for Anthony, how did she become active in politics? Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was born to a Quaker tradition family with a strong “tone of independence and moral zeal” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2017). Because of her family’s Quaker traditions,

In the year of 1826 Anthony’s family moved to Battenville, New York. Anthony would attend a district public school which her father would eventually pull her out of due to Anthony’s teacher refusal to teach her long division. This led her father to create his own school for Anthony and her siblings, and children of the neighborhood. Anthony would begin to teach at this school in 1837, but would later leave to attend Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary in Philadelphia to advance her education. However, after the failure of her father’s business, she would have to leave Philadelphia to go work for her father to help pay his debts, eventually forcing him to declare bankruptcy in 1837. “In 1838, she joined the Daughters of Temperance, which focused on the dangers of alcohol and its negative effect on families, and campaigned for stronger liquor laws. She also began to move away from the Quakers and organized religion in general after witnessing hypocritical behavior, such as drinking alcohol, by preachers and member of the community” (HISTORYNET, 2017). In the early 1840s, Anthony would teach in various schools. “While working as a teacher in

In 1845, Anthony’s family would move to a farm in Rochester, New York. Where she would eventually help run the farm 4 years later in 1849 while her “father started an insurance business.”(HISTORYNET, 2017) Anthony would continue her work with the temperance movement, where she would meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton through Amelia Bloomer. As well as becoming involved in the abolitionist movement. The farm in Rochester, New York would become a meeting ground for abolitionists. This included people such as Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. After Anthony would not be allowed to speak at the temperance meetings, and her reattempt in the year of 1953 at the Sons of Temperance state convention in Albany where she was denied the right to speak again, because women were invited to listen and learn. This sparked Anthony’s true political start with the organization of the first Women’s State Temperance Society in 1853 in New York, “of which Stanton became president, and pushed Anthony’s father in the direction of women’s rights advocacy. In a short time she became known as one of the causes most zealous, serious advocates, a dogged and tireless worker whose personality contrasted sharply with that of her friend and coworker Stanton”